Archive

Coming up at the Hacker Dojo we have quite the interesting Meetup. There is going to be a debate between Jeff Pollock, Monica Anderson, and Dean Allemang about the Semantic Web. Knowing Monica personally and working on the Syntience project, I can say that this will most definitely be a heretical experience, to say the least.

Standing room only! Here’s an expert from the site:

“Jeff Pollock – Mr. Pollock is the author of Semantic Web for Dummies and is a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, responsible for management of Oracle’s data integration product portfolio. Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent systems architect for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006.

Monica Anderson – Ms. Anderson is an artificial intelligence researcher who has been considering the problem of implementing computer based cognition since college. In 2001 she moved from using AI techniques as a programmer to trying to advance the field of “Strong AI” as a researcher. She is the founder of Syntience Inc., which was established to manage funding for her exploration of this field. Syntience is currently exploring a novel algorithm for language independent document comparison and classification. She organizes the Bay Area AI Meetup group.

At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, Monica Anderson presented on the prospect of developing artificial intuition in computer hardware. Further talks are currently planned for delving into the technical details of the project and also exploring the Philosophy and Epistemology to support the theory. For more information on her see: http://artificial-int…
and http://videos.syntien… or http://artificial-int…
Dean Allemang – Dr. Allemang has a formal background, with an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, England, and a PhD in Computer Science from The Ohio State University, USA. He was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. Dr. Allemang has taught classes in Semantic Web technologies since 2004, and has trained many users of RDF, and the Web Ontology Language OWL. He is a lecturer in the Computer Science Department of Boston University.

Dr. Allemang was also the Vice-President of Customer Applications at Synquiry Technologies, where he helped Synquiry’s customers understand how the use of semantic technologies could provide measurable benefit in their business processes. He has filed two patents on the application of graph matching algorithms to the problems of semantic information interchange. In the Technology Transfer group at Swisscom (formerly Swiss Telecom) he co-invented patented technology for high-level analysis of network switching failures. He is a co-author of the Organization Domain Modeling (ODM) method, which addresses cultural and social obstacles to semantic modeling, as well as technological ones. He currently works for Top Quadrant, recently published Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist and has the blog S is for Semantics“